Would Gun Control Have Saved Christopher Lane?

Charlotte Hays

Christopher Lane, a young man from Australia who was in the U.S. on a baseball scholarship, was killed in Oklahoma Tuesday. His killers reportedly shot him because they had been “bored.” Lane appears to have been a random choice.

Christopher Lane is the victim of a feral culture of young men. The left does not want to look at this culture. It is determined to turn Lane’s death into an argument for gun control. This requires them to believe two wildly improbable things: (1.) More stringent gun control would have kept weapons out of the hands of these killers, who were using an illegal firearm anyway. (2.) The young monsters would have been stymied if they hadn’t had a gun. They undoubtedly would have gone to the youth center to make lariats on Tuesday instead of resorting to another method of killing.

Christopher Lane, of Melbourne, was found dead of a gunshot wound on Friday, according to police in Duncan, Oklahoma, about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City.

“They followed him, shot him in the back and drove off,” Duncan, Okla., police chief Danny Ford said yesterday.

“When asked why he [a 17-year-old suspect] did it, he said, ‘We were bored and decided to kill somebody.’ ”

According to police, Jones admitted that the teens decided to kill someone "for the fun of it."

Startlingly enough for those of us who are not limousine liberals and thus are actually intimately acquainted with the public transportation system, the three young men look like scary youths we see with increasing frequency on the subway or buses. So, anecdotally, I am going to say that this is an expanding culture.

The murder is a national story in Australia, where people are contemplating the horror of such casual killing in America. Some are focusing on the ease of obtaining a gun in the U.S., as (inevitably) is the reflexive CNN, and it would almost be a relief if we could blame such a murder on guns.

Then we wouldn't have to focus on a culture that produces teenagers for whom the prospect of shooting an innocent man in the back on a Friday evening apparently raised not a scintilla of conscience. That is the deeper tragedy, and the real scandal, of too much of American life.

That is also an issue of far greater consequence to the future of young black men than the acquittal of George Zimmerman in his awful showdown with Trayvon. If only Mr. Sharpton and his fellow black leaders paid attention to what was missing in the lives of those three teenagers. Maybe President Obama would even care to use it as one of his teachable moments.

We will no doubt learn over the next few days that the three young men arrested were growing up in single-parent households—or maybe we won’t learn that because the media doesn’t want to report that. They’d rather focus on guns. I’d like a gun control advocate to explain how gun control would have made the three men less feral. Then it could be explained to them that people bent on a murder to relieve their boredom would find another method.

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Independent Women’s Forum’s mission is to improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty. Sister organization of Independent Women’s Voice.